


Bjorn Free Part One

by grayspider1974



Category: Vikings - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Vulgar Humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 15:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7059385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayspider1974/pseuds/grayspider1974
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bjorn gets annoyed, and strikes out on his own. After diverse misadventures, he finds himself in the grand imperial city of Constantinople. There he hangs out with a rabbi and a strange old woman from Karelia, and meets Memphis Sally. Part One of a two-part story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bjorn Free Part One

Bjorn Free  
Author’s Note I don’t own Vikings. I also don’t own the Kalevala or the Book of Proverbs or the poems of Catellus...but they all got together and ganged up on me one night, and this strange mutant brain-baby is the result. I wrote it, lost it, and rewrote it again, give or take a few sick puns. It would not leave me alone, so now I give it to you…I hope you like it. It’s supposed to take place somewhere around the end of Season Three. I confess that my Finnish is not very good, because Old Ghost Eyes only tried to teach it to me when we were both extremely drunk. If you like a soundtrack to go with your reading material, I would suggest Constantinople by The Residents, or When You’re Strange by the Doors, or pretty much anything by Leonard Cohen, played as loudly as your neighbours will tolerate...  
Chapter One Bjorn Away  
Ragnar Lothbrook, sometimes known as the Wrath of God had a vicious hangover, as most of the adult population of Kattegat probably did that morning. He was also quite certain that someone had shaved his head again while he was sleeping, and written something on it.  
“It says ‘insert brain here’” said Aslaug, his second wife. “What about me”  
“It says ‘For a good time, roll me over’ on your rump.”  
Asslaug sighed, and got up to open the shutters.  
“OW! OW! OW! OW!” Ragnar shouted. His hangover had turned him into a wet lump of misery. “Are you trying to kill me”  
“It stinks in here,” said Asslaug “so either I let some fresh air in, or you go out. Go have a sauna.”  
“I can’t. Bjorn got pissed off last night and tipped over the sauna. Floki and Helga were still in it.”  
“What was he so angry about”  
“I think his girlfriend yelled at him because he fell asleep on top of her….this one’s probably going to run away too.”  
It was in fact a fairly pleasant October day in Kattegat, with only a light dusting of snow on the hog wallow.   
“Speaking of Bjorn, where is he He’s usually moping about the hog wallow at this time of day.  
“He might be eating,” said Asslaug. “He will eat a whole side of bacon, if you let him. There’s a lot of food that goes into Bjorn.”  
“There’s a lot of Bjorn.”  
Indeed there was, and it made Bjorn’s absence even more palpable. It was soon plain that he had packed up his personal effects (including his bearskin and his axe) and pilfered a large chunk of the larder, and then carefully set the sauna back on its foundations. He had also scratched a note on the door in charcoal. His runes were surprisingly tidy for the handwriting of someone who resembled a cross between a bull moose and a haystack.  
PISSED OFF  
GONE FOR WALK  
DO NOT FOLLOW ME  
“Well, Lagberta’s going to be pissed off,” said Asslaug.  
“Bjorn’s big enough to take care of himself, “said Ragnar “He’ll probably come back in a week or two when he’s hungry. If not, we’ll tell his mother.”  
Chapter Two The Karelian Mushroom Pickle  
Several months later, Bjorn finally realized that he should have gone back before he reached Finland. He had ambled across Norway and Sweden with few remarkable incidents…sometimes the locals were friendly and offered him drink, but for the most part they saw him and ran away screaming. The Fennae, on the other hand, seemed to have known of his arrival in advance, and had bugged out entirely. He kept finding tidy farms and hamlets with everything neatly in its place and with all the fires banked but still radiating heat. All of these farms had larders, and most had still rooms as well, so he pilfered whatever he could carry. He had just unearthed a large ceramic jug of vodka and several jars of various pickles when he felt as though someone had just goosed him, and heard somebody giggle. He stood up, and felt an odd, uncomfortable tightness in his lower abdomen that he usually only got when women were around. He could not see anyone, but he felt as though someone was standing right behind him…in fact, he could smell her. Then he felt someone blow in his ear, and a girl’s face suddenly appeared right in front of him. She was fairly cute, although she had a rather prominent nose and a supernumerary tooth, and she flipped him the bird. “Yo, heikkomeilenen! Bai kala vitu!” she said, and then vanished as abruptly as she had appeared. It was at that point that Bjorn bolted. Women made him uncomfortable…and vanishing ghost women made him even more uncomfortable than the usual sort. After a while, he had a drink to settle his nerves, and then another, and after a while he was quite pickled, and he lost his solar compass somewhere around Lake Ladoga. Then an innocent-seeming jar of pickled mushrooms turned out to be made from the hallucinogenic variety, and he galloped through the forest hallucinating that he was being pursued by the text of the Voluspa written in Futhark. As such, he had not been entirely lucid when he reached Estonia, got drunk again and signed on with a party of amber merchants who sailed up one river and down another (one river was called the Volga, but he forgot the name of the other river) and then made the enormous mistake of signing on with a Greek trading cog whose crew had turned overly friendly on him….but truly, his worst mistake was probably eating a punnet of oysters the night that Dimitri had told him he had a pretty mouth and tried to kiss him, because it was now quite evident that the oysters had been tainted. As such, he had been found floating in the Bosphorus Strait, naked as the day he was born, badly sunburned and clutching a narwhal tusk that he had picked up somewhere on the coast of the Baltic so he would have something to carve in his idle moments. Now Bjorn was curled up on somebody’s mosaic floor, suffering from the worst case of food poisoning he had ever had in his life. Some woman had thrown a shawl over him, but there really was no way to cover his shame. They were all staring at him…the two men that had fished him out of the Strait, two other men who looked as though they might be important, five women, and a small boy. The woman who had thrown her shawl over him stood closest. She was small and looked extremely elderly and frail, though he guessed that she was probably a lot tougher than she looked. There was something oddly familiar about her face, which under its wrinkles still had elegant cheekbones and a prominent nose that made her look like some sort of fierce predatory bird, and she appeared to still have all her teeth, plus a supernumerary tooth. She smelled unusual…not the usual old-lady smell at all, but spicy and woodsy with a faint touch of whale vomit, and under that, something unnameable that he had smelled before.  
“Puhutko Suomi” she asked, then asked the same question again and again in several languages before asking it in Norse.  
“Ya, I speak Norse,” he said. Then he recognized the smell, and where he had seen a face similar to the old woman, and Bjorn tried to crawl away. The old woman touched one long finger to the tip of his nose, and he felt a tingling, like what you feel win someone scuffs wool-socked feet on a thick fur rug and then touches you, only much stronger. The lady had a rather nice cameo ring on that finger…indeed, she was decked out in trinkets of shell, ivory, pale cloudy amber, wood, and small animal bones, gauded here and there with bits of silver, and her gown and shawl were of a fine white wool woven with silver thread around the edges…good stuff, but the shawl was probably ruined.  
“Sit still,buckethead! I’m trying to take your pulse!” she said.  
“Leave me alone, volva.”  
“Don’t call me that. They call me Louhi Sariola, Lady of Pojala, Mistress of Song, The Good Hostess, Moon Thief, Lady Lou and sometimes That Horrible Woman…take your choice of epithets because I have many but “volva” is not one of them. And DO try to sit still while I check your pupils, because I am trying to help you. At any rate, your pupils are contracted, your heart rate is elevated, you’ve got one hell of a sunburn and several minor lacerations, and you appear to have eaten morbid oysters some time in the past twenty-four hours. And retzina…oh, that is vile stuff, indeed! I believe you may have had an unfortunate encounter with a boatload of Greek sailors.”  
Bjorn nodded.  
“Did they sodomise you”  
Bjorn shrugged. “I don’t know what that means.”  
“Did any of them put it up your arse”  
“I don’t think so… I don’t remember too well.”  
“Is your arse sore”  
“Um…no. Where am I”  
Lady Lou spoke to the others in a language that was completely alien to Bjorn. The word “tuchas” was used repeatedly. One of the older women made sympathetic cooing noises, while the other looked at Bjorn like he was something horrible that had just crawled out from under a rock. The three younger girls whispered among themselves, and the little boy watched him curiously.  
“All right then,” said Louhi “You are in the grand imperial city of Constantinople. This gentleman is the Imperial Harbourmaster, David Cohen. The gentleman with the beard is his brother, Rabbi Joel Cohen. The elderly lady who is making sympathetic noises is their aunt Sadie, and the other is David’s wife Esther. These are their daughters—Rachel, Ruth, and Rebecca.”  
“Rebecca…pekka…pekka…” the small boy added, and he grinned and wiggled his ears.  
“Oh…and Barak. At any rate, you need to behave yourself, because these are decent and civilized people, and they don’t need to take shit from anyone. And your name, young sir”  
“Bjorn Ragnarsson. They call me Ironside.”  
“Hanh,” said Louhi “Your sides may be iron, but your stomach clearly is not. At any rate the aedili brought you here in the middle of the Cohen family’s Passover Seder, and because Jews traditionally make an effort to help people who arrive unexpectedly at Passover, you have been invited to stay, so try not to act like an absolute pig. Oh…don’t try to stand up!”  
Bjorn managed to stand up, but then he lurched, skidded, and went crashing to the floor, knocked over an oil lamp, and cracked his head on the edge of the fountain in the middle of the courtyard where he had been laid down.  
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! THAT HURT!” he muttered. Blood was dripping from his scalp and making interesting patterns in the water.  
“Seems like your head ain’t made out of iron either,” said Louhi as she fished Bjorn out of the fountain. For some reason this made him chortle a bit just before he blacked out.  
Chapter Three Civilization  
Bjorn learned that the Cohens were civilized people, and that he really rather liked people who were civilized. His own family were not at all civilized or particularly pleasant to be around. He knew that his father was a randy, unprincipled pig, and his mother was quite literally a cut-throat bitch. His father’s second wife was even worse, and he had lost all respect for his uncle when Rollo sold them all out to the French. The only members of his family that he actually liked were his sister (who was dead) and some of his half siblings…although the youngest one had been a mean little bugger since before he started talking, and despite his severe physical limitations was an absolute terror! His father had kept a Christian priest for a while who had been a nice person (although a bit of a shmuck, to use one of the new words he had learned) but Floki (who was a giant, flaming putz if there ever was one) had gone and knocked Aethelstan’s head off for no good reason. The Cohenim, on the other hand, were nice people. They washed their hands before eating, and did not stab people’s eyes out at the dinner table. Their house had mosaic floors, and fig trees growing around the fountain that Bjorn had smacked his head on when he arrived, rather than a pig wallow. The Cohenim did not keep pigs; in fact, they did not eat pork or shellfish or a number of other things, and while Bjorn missed eating bacon, he would be perfectly if he never ate another oyster for the rest of his days. Indeed, for the next few days his stomach could not handle much besides chicken soup with dill (he was suspicious of matzoh balls, and refused to eat them) and yoghurt with honey. Aunt Sadie also put yoghurt on his skin to help heal the burns, and made up a bed for him in a basement storeroom whose one window opened on the shady courtyard where Joel Cohen tutored Barack and his friends in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, history, literature, mathematics, and religious studies. Bjorn watched, utterly fascinated by the things these children were learning at an age when his father and uncle were teaching him how to kill people. He had an extensive knowledge of his own culture and beliefs, and a rudimentary knowledge of runic characters, but the Torah was far older and stranger than the Norse ways and incredibly beautiful, and Hebrew was a beautiful language. It even looked beautiful when written down, like leaping flames. When he told Louhi what he thought, she looked at him strangely.  
“Well, if you were a Jew you would make a good Torah scholar, and if you were a Finn, I could teach you to be a Master of Song. But you ain’t either. You can’t become a Finn, and you’d have to be circumcised to become a Jew.”  
“What’s that” Bjorn asked.  
“They cut off the end of your shlong.”  
“You’re joking.”  
“No, I’m not. They cut off your foreskin when you’re eight days old.”  
“That’s appalling.”  
“No worse than blood-eagling somebody, is it”  
“Why can’t I be a Finn, then”  
“You probably couldn’t even learn our language. I’ll try to teach you how to count to twenty in Suomi. If you don’t just give up I’ll teach you more. Try it. Yksi, kaksi, kolme, nelja…”  
“Yksi, kaksi, kolme, nelja…”  
“Viisi, kuusi, seitseman, kadeksan…”   
“Viisi, kuusi, seitseman, kadeksan…”  
This continued for some time, but by the time Bjorn reached “Seitsemantoista” (seventeen) his mind started to wander. Rebecca had just wandered past…she smelled of jasmine, and of something else. Bjorn’s face turned white.  
“I got that cramp again,” he said. “I get it whenever a young, healthy woman walks by…it’s the way that they smell.”  
“It may be because all the blood rushes straight to your groin,” said Louhi. “I’m surprised you don’t faint from all the blood leaving your brain.”  
“Sometimes I do. I had a wife, but she bugged out on me. Before that…ow, not again!”  
“Oh dear…well, if I ever get the chance, I might introduce you to some of my granddaughters. They’re younger than me, and more suited to help you with your problem.”  
“I might have met one. She goosed me and then flipped me the bird, and then she vanished into thin air. I thought she was a ghost, and bugged out.”  
“She was no ghost, she was using See Me Not. You have to have ghost eyes to see ghosts, and you don’t have ghost eyes.”  
“How many people like you are there” asked Bjorn.  
“I don’t really know. My own family numbers in the hundreds, but there are other families both in Karelia and outside of it…in fact, I think Kaukomieli may have snuck over to Norway and poked your great-grandmother. Kauki’s children are usually good-looking and clever and prone to wander.”  
“My father always claimed to be descended from Odin.”  
Louhi shook her head. “I really don’t think the Aesir have any business meddling in the lives of men…they have their own shit to deal with. I’ve never met them, and I don’t want to…I’ve met Jesus. He was One of Us, and he never actually claimed to be the Only Begotten Son of God.”  
“He didn’t”  
“He did not. Whenever anyone asked Jesus if he was the Son of God, Jesus would ask ‘is that who you think I am’ He was a decent person who had some great ideas and was always nice to his mother, but he never claimed divine birth and would be horrified by the things some people do in his name.”  
“So he’s really dead.”  
“Oh, no…he came back. We all come back again and again and again. That’s what it actually means to be born again, and it beats being stuck in Valhalla or Hades for all eternity, don’t it”  
Bjorn really did not know what to say, and did not even have time to respond because Mr. Cohen came in. “The Xena hove into port, so I had her impounded. The crew all tried to charge you with attempted piracy, but I think you can charge them with kidnapping, theft and assault. Technically speaking you weren’t raped because no actual penetration was involved. I’ll get you a good lawyer, and we’ll go to the baths this afternoon, cut your hair and find you a decent kaftan. You’re going to court, so it’s probably a good idea not to look like a barbarian even if you are one.  
The baths were an interesting surprise that could have turned dreadful had it not been explained to Bjorn that the nice, shiny brown lady with the impressively muscled arms was named Memphis Sally, and she was supposed to give him a massage, but she also wanted to give him a little something extra.  
“I’m not a slave or a whore,” she added. “I just like exotic men, and I’ve never seen hair as light as yours, or such fair skin…you must burn really easily, though.”  
“Well, if you want I’ll take you back to Kattegat...”  
“Bless you!”  
“Excuse me”   
“Didn’t you just sneeze” Sally asked.  
“No, that’s where I’m from. Kattegat. If I ever go back and you really want to go, I’ll take you. It’s bloody cold six months of the year but there are blond people everywhere, and even a few redheads, and…ouch!”  
“Did that hurt”  
“It does.”  
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it” The girl seemed very sympathetic, and well…nice. If she really wanted to do what Bjorn thought she wanted to do to him, well…  
“I’ll give you a towel to bite down on, if you’re a screamer. Just relax and try to breathe through your nose. This should not take too long…”  
It took longer than Bjorn had expected, and the ending was rather messy. Bjorn felt lightheaded, but at least he did not hurt. Sally beamed down at him.  
“Thank you. I might need a little help to get up,” was all he managed to say afterwards.  
Chapter Four The Trial  
The trial the following day was a strange experience for Bjorn, because he had never before had to sit still for so long. The crew of the Xena (with the exception of two men who had expired from eating the same tainted oysters that had put Bjorn off solid food for a week) had all survived, but the man who had instigated the attack had had his lower lip half bitten off and had been stabbed several times, and the shape of the wounds suggested that they had been made with a sharp object with a distinctively spiral form, such as the narwhal tusk that had been impounded as evidence. Other crew members had been stabbed, kicked, and punched before Bjorn succeeded in jumping off the ship. Their lawyer described Bjorn as a “primitive savage” (which he supposed was true) a pirate (also true) a cannibal (not true) and a ravening homophobe (which did not make sense to Bjorn….he did not like men, but he was not at all frightened of them). Bjorn sat there, and tried to assume the expression of horror and injured innocence that his father’s slave Aethelstan had habitually worn….though to his knowledge, no one in Kattegat had ever tried to bugger that poor, sad little Saxon. After a point, however, Bjorn found it hard to keep from sniggering as his own lawyer described him as a “flaxen-haired innocent” a “child of Nature” and a “poor orphan far from home.” His lawyer then exhorted the judge and jury to consider Bjorn’s poor sainted mother back home….which nearly made Bjorn howl with laughter, because he had just been described as an orphan about a minute earlier, and he knew his mother was anything but a saint! He took several deep breaths, and started counting under his breath in Finnish. He had reached kolmankemmeseitseman, or thirty-seven, before he realized that his eyes were watering from the effort of controlling the urge to laugh hysterically, and that the slanting sunlight that poured through the courthouse window lit him up like a Christian icon. The jury might have thought that Bjorn was praying…it was like he was acting in some Christian miracle play, and he must have played his role well because the court dismissed the charges against him and charged the crew of the Xena with kidnapping and assault. The ship was ordered to be sold, and a portion of the sale given to Bjorn to pay for damages. His personal effects were returned to him, including the narwhal horn, his axe, his boots, his bearskin, his sealskin coat, and the oddments that were still in his pockets including several bits of twine, his razor, a curious item called a toothbrush, several small coins of various nations, a bit of rye bread that had been there since he had left Estonia and which was starting to grow fungus, and some strange tubes that someone had given him whose purpose he had yet to define.  
“They’re condoms made from sheep’s intestines,” said Louhi “you put them on your shlong when you…hey, I don’t think you should eat that!”  
Bjorn was chewing idly on the bread. He considered taking it out, but instead he swallowed it “It’s a bit old, but still edible,” he said.   
“Maybe the bread was, but I’m not so sure about the ergot that was growing on it,” said Louhi. “I think I better get you back to the Cohen place before the flying monkeys arrive.”  
The flying monkeys got to Bjorn half way across the plaza in front of the Church of Holy Mother Wisdom, as did the galloping runes and dancing Hebrew letters. He bolted straight towards the open doors of the church, but stumbled and fell flat on his face once he got through the doors. Bjorn rolled over and stared up into the immense mosaic dome overhead. This place was BIG…you could drop Kattegat inside of it with room to spare, and up above him was the biggest Christian icon he had ever seen in his life…yet at the same time, it was the face of his mother, and she was flaming mad at him.  
“Turn now at my reproof, and I will pour out my spirit unto you. I will make known my words unto you.”  
“I’m sorry, Mother!” Beautiful, terrible, wonderful, horrible….it was like the Karelian Pickled Mushroom Incident, only he was inside a Christian church and he had no desire to run. He ended up trying to hug a nun who brought him a cup of coffee, but she took it entirely the wrong way, screamed bloody murder and hit Bjorn with her tray and knocked him out long enough for the aedili to load him into a handcart and take him to the Drunk Tank, where Mr. Cohen had to bail him out the following morning.


End file.
